1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a robot hand and a robot apparatus.
2. Related Art
Traditionally, a robot hand which is attached to a distal end of an industrial robot arm or the like and holds or releases an object to carry out predetermined work, and more specifically, a multifunctional robot hand which holds a tool and carries outwork such as assembling of a component and which also holds and arranged a very small component accurately is known (see, for example, JP-A-60-25686).
JP-A-60-25686 discloses a technique of a robot hand which uses a differential gear mechanism and a spring as a passive element and thus can hold an object to be held (object) securely and stably even if the object to be held changes in shape or the like, thus achieving sufficient adaptability to disturbance. However, the robot hand and the robot apparatus according to the related art have the following problems.
That is, in the robot hand described in JP-A-60-25686, the passive element only has the function of opening or closing the entire fingers and does not have a function to allow the finger sections to adapt to the object and thus increase the number of contact points. Therefore, the robot hand has a problem that the two finger sections cannot contact the object at many points and therefore cannot hold the object in a stable state.
Also, since the relative position of the finger sections cannot be changed, it is impossible to realize various holding forms, for example, holding a spherical object in a wrapping manner or holding a thin plate-like object between the finger sections facing each other. Thus, there is room for improvement on this point.